Sacred Cows

بِسۡمِ ٱللهِ ٱلرَّحۡمَـٰنِ ٱلرَّحِيمِ 

Shaykh Muhammad Asad Leopold Weiss (r.a.) wrote , in “The Road to Mecca”, about his conversation with Imam Muhammad Muswthafa al-Maraghi (r.a.) of Al-Azhar: 

“Do you see those scholars over there?” he asked me.  “They are like those sacred cows in India which, I am told eat up all the printed paper they can find in the streets ...”  He continued, “Yes, they gobble up all the printed pages from books that have been written centuries ago, but they do not digest them.  They no longer think for themselves; they read and repeat, read and repeat, and the students who listen to them learn only to read and repeat, generation after generation.” 

“But, Shaykh Muswthafa,” he interposed, “Al-Azhar is, after all, the central seat of Islamic learning, and the oldest university in the world!  One encounters its name on nearly every page of Muslim cultural history.  What about all the great thinkers, the theologians, historians, philosophers, mathematicians it has produced over the last ten centuries?” 

“It stopped producing them several centuries ago,” he replied ruefully.  “Well, perhaps not quite; here and there an independent thinker has somehow managed to emerge from Al-Azhar even in recent times.  But on the whole, Al-Azhar has lapsed into the sterility from which the whole Muslim world is suffering, and its old impetus is all but extinguished.  Those ancient Islamic thinkers whom you have mentioned would never have dreamed that after so many centuries, their thoughts, instead of being continued and developed, would only be repeated over and over again, as if they were ultimate and infallible truths.  If there is to be any change for the better, thinking must be encouraged instead of the present thought-imitation ...” 

And this is the same problem we have with the Muslim world.  We have far too many people who can regurgitate the texts, and not enough who ponder over them to discern the Divine Intent.